My original post on anarchism and the cataclysms of the 20th century has certainly engendered some lively debate, and here’s something to add to it. It’s actually to draw the attention of Troppo Armadillians to the work of a man I’ve only just become aware of(in fact since yesterday, trawling on the Internet!). He is Professor Rik Coolsaet, a Belgian, Director of Security and Global Government at the Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels, and also Professor of International Relations at Ghent University. Professor Coolsaet published a book last year on the phenomenon of Al Qaeda, as well as a historical overview of the problem of terrorism, and this book has just been published in English by Academia Press, under the title of Al Qaeda–The Myth. In it, apparently, Professor Coolsaet argues that terrorism is born not out of the usual ‘root causes’ usually mentioned, such as poverty, but out of marginalisation. I haven’t read the book, only extracts and summaries on Professor Coolsaet’s website and other places, so I can’t and won’t argue about his thesis. What I did find interesting in the context of what we’ve been argy-bargying and discussing about, is that he specifically mentions and discusses the late 19th/early 20th century anarchist terrorists (as well as others, such as the fascist terrorists of the 1930′s) in the context of a discussion of Al Qaeda, and how a knowledge of that turn of the century period might indeed be of interest to people surveying the situation now. He seemed to be in no doubt, actually, that the anarchist terrorists were, indeed, anarchists!
For those interested in following this up, here is Professor Coolsaet’s website:
here

Tim Dunlop blogs about the influence of Howard government “black arts” gurus Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor on British Tory election campaigning:

Sorry, but it’s a crock. I mean, far be it from me to defend Lynton Crosby, and I’m sure he is organising such a campaign, but in so doing he is not bringing anything new to British politics, merely tapping into a rich strand already present. …

The fact is, British politicians are old hands at playing the race card and they didn’t need Lynton Crosby to teach them anything.

The last sentence is tritely true, but the rest of Tim’s post completely misses the point of what it is that Crosby-Textor actually do:
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Funny the directions in which research for books can take you. As part of my research for my planned detective fiction series, I’ve been reading a lot of ‘true-crime’ books from the 1910′s, 20′s and 30′s, and one of the authors I’ve been reading is a once-famous writer and criminologist called Harry Ashton-Wolfe. He was a friend of Conan Doyle’s, and also of the extraordinary French criminologist and director of police techniques laboratories in Lyon, Dr Edmond Locard(whose books I’ve also been reading). When Ashton-Wolfe was on a trip to Lyon to speak with Dr Locard (who was dubbed the ‘French Sherlock Holmes’), he came across a rogues’ gallery of criminals the Lyon Surete had had a hand in identifying and arresting: and he was astonished to find the face of an ex-chauffeur of his staring out at him. Turned out this was none other than the notorious anarchist bandit Jules Bonnot, who with his ‘Bande a Bonnot’ (Bonnot’s Gang)had, in 1911, the dubious distinction of being the first bank robber to use a getaway car. Bonnot’s reign of terror–he robbed banks and murdered people, all in the name of anarchist revolution–lasted only a year or two, but he was part of the whole climate of anarchist violence that convulsed Europe from the 1890′s on. (Turned out Bonnot had indeed been Ashton-Wolfe’s driver, for a year or two, and indeed he had driven Conan Doyle on occasion too; he was a gifted mechanic as well. )
Anyway, getting on the trail of this guy led me to look more closely at the whole anarchist phenomenon–one I’d been aware of, but without any real context. And the more I read, the more I wondered–was it the anarchists who really spawned the violent and terrifying twentieth century, and the convulsions which tore it apart? In many countries, their terrorist outrages, assassinations and bombings paved the way for the bloodthirsty ideological tyrannies of the century–Communism, Fascism, Nazism–which of course reinforced the power of the State to a pitch never before seen; and also precipitated the First World War. The instability which the anarchists so gleefully and naively fostered–which was used and manipulated by the tyrants waiting in the wings as well as the fearful earlier autocrats–was supposed to open the way for a happy, humane society freed of constraints and external power–free of State, Church and capitalism–but instead inflicted barbarity and hideous misery on millions, not to speak of vast, corrupt and crushing bureaucracies.
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